Don't judge a journey by its prose
Would we think of As I Lay Dying as a hero’s journey if we weren’t talking about it in the context of this class? If one didn’t look too deep into it, and just read some of the most confusing parts of the book, they’d probably just decide that As I Lay Dying was written too weirdly to fit into a neat model of the Hero’s journey. However, in my opinion, the jumbled-ness of the narrative pattern doesn’t inherently make the plot of As I Lay Dying too erratic to be applied to the Hero’s Journey, but the nature of the story and its characters makes it a pretty bad fit for a Hero’s Journey. I think a good exercise to help us evaluate the Heroic journey-ness of As I Lay Dying is comparing it to the Odyssey, which Faulkner says inspired him. What does the Odyssey have in common with As I lay dying? 1. The journey for sure. Both stories are about a group of people undertaking a journey with a heroic purpose. In the Odyssey, the journey is of the strong, great, warrior King Odyssea...